CES 2012: Recap

It’s been a few days since CES 2012 wrapped up, and now that we’re back on the east coast, we wanted to give you a recap of some of the cool products we checked out as well as what to expect in terms of reviews.

In year’s past there have been product themes at CES, with multiple companies putting out competing devices in a particular category. In 2008, CES was smartphone central, as companies acted swiftly to compete with Apple’s iPhone. Last year, the big ticket items were tablets (all of which failed to gain any appreciable marketshare against Apple’s iPad) and 3D TVs (which did happen to finally go beyond niche status, as noted by the large presence of ESPN 3D at this year’s CES). For CES 2012, however, there really wasn’t any big ticket item, but instead across-the-board improvements to staples of the consumer electronics field, like TVs and smartphones.

LG’s 55-inch OLED TV was a universal hit. The picture quality was spectacular and at a mere 4 millimeters thin, you can fit this pretty much on any wall!

Also spectacular was Motorola’s Droid Razr smartphone. We checked out the phone in action and were blown away by it’s fast performance and insane battery life. Even while running on Verizon’s 4G LTE network, the Droid Razr rates for 20 hours of continuous browsing and 7 hours of continuous talking. Verizon made a splash at CES 2011 with the announcement of its 4G LTE network, but consumers rightly complained about the horrible battery life of 4G LTE enabled devices. If the new Droid Razr can live up to its battery life claims, it will be a vast improvement over initial devices and should be a hot product for 2012.

The pnosker.com crew is big on audio, and CES 2012 gave us plenty of opportunities to demo a plethora of headphones and in-ear monitors. We checked out the newest line of headphones from established players (like Marshall and Monster) as well as from some new companies in the field (like ClarityOne and Aftershokz). We have plenty of headphones to review, so definitely be on the lookout for our review articles over the next several weeks.

Lastly, I want to give a shout out to the folks over at Monster, who were extremely friendly and hospitable toward us. We had a blast attending their Press Conference, demoing their new lines of headphones at their booth, and most of all, attending their concert featuring Chicago and after party! I’ll be writing a specific CES 2012 recap article for Monster in the next few days, and be on the lookout for some product reviews later in the year.

We’re sad that CES 2012 is over, but we’ll definitely be back next year! Of course, in the ~360 days until CES 2013, make sure you keep visiting pnosker.com daily to see all of our upcoming CES 2012 product reviews!

Michael Convente is the Associate Editor at pnosker.com. In addition to his editing and writing duties, he is also a current fourth year Cell and Molecular Biology graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is working toward a PhD. When not working hard in the lab, Michael uses his free time to read the latest news and trends in tech and also review tech products, with the goal of providing the best in tech news and reviews possible to pnosker.com readers.